ITT: Drama.

So, what part of "private message" does the P not relate to in 'PM'?  I think that's kind of rude, especially considering the only purpose it can possibly serve is to personally attack him in the public and attempt to further discredit. Personal attacks like this are better off remaining in /private/ messages.

Gil's a good guy. He can be pretty harsh at times and isn't one to mince words, which can lead to some misunderstandings of the nature of his messages, but to go to this extent and oust him because he's "being mean"? I thought the #1 rule of Pixelation was: "Don't be an ass". Flame threads such as this do nothing but show the asinine nature of all involved (yes, myself included, as I'm further enticing the thread (though hoping for a conclusion sooner than later)).

What may be the best for this thread is a lock and warning from a neutral moderator saying anything further should be taken up in PM. Warnings should be issued to those that have attacked others.

Although I guess some mods might be upset that someone without any moderator privileges would dare to give an honest and hopefully-unbiased disclosure idea...

Man, I'm so dissappointed in the DS.

I've heard people say that it's not really meant to be an adventure type console, and that the touch screen is not really supposed to be used for anything more than 3 minute sessions of (ultimately) boring play. Well, I think that if that's what Nintendo is doing, then they're in the wrong, since the stylus can act just like a mouse, and this opens up a whole new slew of gaming ideas that don't really seem to be opening up to the minds of the creators.

First person shooters with better control setups than Metroid Prime: Hunters, and Goldeneye: Rogue Agent are possible, although the tiny resolution and lackluster 3D prevent it from dong as good as the PSP probably could even without the intuitive touch screen.  First person adventure games (I'm looking square at Bethesda here) could have so many new features (directional attacking, first person based puzzles, runic magic, to name a very few), sort of like Lost in Blue might be doing. Racing games could do a neat, although not possibly the best, steering wheel and/or clutch mechanism, or even something as creatively simple as a real time strategy game could be rather easily implemented.

There are also a ton of new app type things that could be opened up with the use of the GBA slot. The pixel program would be great, and especially so if they did something to expand upon PictoChat to allow, for instance, avatars and online WiFi conversations from just about anywhere (OK, so it'd be more like MSN on a WiFi connection than PictoChat, heh). Or make a browser type app to browse the web, since the DS is going online soon (yay!). The Nintendo Play-Yan is a neat idea, and seems to be a pretty handy-dandy little mpeg-4 and mp3 playback unit -- along with other tiny little games -- for those of you who don't know about it, although video is kind of lacking from what I can tell because of the smaller screen size. That and I'd rather have my handy-dandy 20GB MP3 player for music, anyway.

Developing for a system with such an unprecedented amount of potential would really be a lot of fun, and I'd absolutely love to get my hands on a Dev-Kit to really start working on something, but I guess Nintendo's being rather sticky about this one... real shame, too.

As for games, Kirby is a good game, sort of. To be honest, I got bored rather quickly. Probably only about halfway through the game and I didn't really want to keep going, although it really does begin to take use of the touch screen for a new type of gameplay when compared to the other games out.

Yoshi's Touch & Go seems to be more of a 3 minute coffee break style game, but I think that'd require actually wanting to look forward to playing it when you did get a break. The first time I played it, I thought it was neat. I hoped there was more to it, but the next 3 and 4 times I played it, there just wasn't. Every couple days I pick it up, thinking if I just sat back and ignored the fact that it's not an adventure meant to be played for hours at a time game or to just put aside my previous feelings about it, I'd like it, but so far, even after opening everything up and exploring the new modes, it's still boring as all hell.

I only ever got to play Polaris once, and it seemed to be fun. Maybe not super great, "OMG I Have to play again and again!!" type fun, but entertaining for the few minutes it lasted, heh. I've never played Meteos, so I have no idea what that's like, although I heard it really is a lot of fun if you're into the Tetris Attack style puzzlegames with a twist.

Um, Unless you really like the Yoshi's Touch & Go Coffee Break style gameplay (to reiterate, just a few minutes at a time), I wouldn't recommend Feel the Magic: XX/XY or, for that matter, the better Wario Ware. I mean, they both have their moments where they're fun, but minigame after minigame.... so many of them were so lackluster that of the few hundred there, I probably only play 5 or 6 often, and even then, the minigames on Super Mario 64 DS are more fun.

In my opinion, the best game here is Super Mario 64 DS. Oh, and Metroid Prime: Hunters Demo... The Mario is just the same Mario as the 64, only with a few more things, like controlling Luigi, or Yoshi, or Wario, and minigames, and more stars. Not a super duper gotta get it type game, but still good.

From what I can gather, those are the best games out. I haven't tried the Need for Speed or whatever other game it was, or Pac-Pix, or really, any of the others. GoldenEye: Rogue Agent and Madden NFL 209999 were only decent. Not super great, and nothing really worth getting unless you really wanted a First person shooter or a football game, respectively, for your portable system.

There is quite a lineup of games coming out soon that look to be more interesting. Nintendogs, for instance, or even Snowboard Kids DS (I loved the original, I don't care what people say, heh). Slime Mori Mori Dragon Quest 2 (heh, no, really, that's the name. I'm not advertising my name, hehe) might be alright along with Lunar: Dragon Song if you want some RPG stuff going on.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory DS is probably one of those games I wouldn't get, 'cause I never found the first ones entertaining, fun, or interesting at all. There are plenty of other games at least partially worthy of note that I can remember noted for future release; Bust-A-Move DS, Mario Kart DS, Animal Crossing DS, Advance Wars DS, and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow.

And, um... Yeah, sorry for being so friggin' verbose. I get that way every now and then, y'know.

So for the gajillionth time, I joined the pixelation IRC channel only to find that it was dead ('cept for Chiko)

Also realize that StairwaytoEvan is the worst idler in the history of the chatroom, so he's just not been there while there actually -is- something going on.

But, yeah, join and talk to all the cool peoples like me.

BrotherInWar: Get a better internet. Like Cable, or DSL at least.

trick: You can change that option in your profile to set you back to the topic instead of the main forum. It's under Look and Layout Preferences.

As for the Zoom function, Firefox's Zoom function acts a little funky on the board. I believe that the forum is creating iframes for every post with a size based on the amount of data (I haven't checked, so... it's only theoretical, heh). Which is fine, but upon increasing that data by, say, zooming in on an image 400%, it creates scrollbars, and that is a little annoying. I'm not sure exactly what you guys can do about that other than taking out the iframes. But perhaps when the Zoom function is built in, it will be able to get around that problem.

This isn't exactly what I would call "Extreme" by any means. Heh.

On to the current topic, however, I'm a firm believer that the DS has the potential to be a much better system than the PSP. Not because the DS has great hardware - actually, I'm pretty disappointed in that category - but because of the touch screen, microphone, GBA port, and dual-screens.  I don't really think that Nintendo sees it, but those together have the ability to make some very unique and far more interesting games than even the top of the line lineup (meaning, Yoshi's Touch & Go, Kirby: Canvas Curse, and Super Mario 64 DS) in my opinion. The DS is not just a system meant for minigames. Why is it being treated like one?

Game wise, the PSP probably has the DS beat. I don't know. But I'm not very excited with the games for the DS, since most of the best ones are simply minigames. Super Mario 64 DS was good, but, come on, it's just a slightly upgraded version of the 64 one. Yoshi's Touch & Go, to be honest, bored the hell out of me within minutes. Kirby: Canvas Curse is probably the best thing the system has seen yet, but it's still not "great." I am looking forward to some of the upcoming games, however, like Animal Crossing DS, Nintendogs, Metroid Prime: Hunters, etc.

So for me, it was basically that the DS wasn't no ridiculous sum of money and it has potential. Hell, anyone could basically brainstorm up a dozen great ideas for this system in just a few hours, if not less. If only some of those would come to fruition.

Hell yeah Wisconsin is hot this summer. Like constantly 90 and higher.

Heh. Not sure how hot that is compared to the normal summer temperature there, but it's been consistently 100+ here since about the beginning of May (that's about 37.8+ Celsius to those of you that don't use Fahrenheit). Of course, I live in a desert, and guess what happens?